Language and certainty

What are human languages, such that they can be acquired and used as they
are? This class surveys some of the most important and recent approaches to this question,
breaking the problem up along traditional lines. In spoken languages, what are the basic
speech sounds? How are these sounds articulated and combined? What are the basic units of
meaning? How are the basic units of meaning combined into complex phrases? How are these
complexes interpreted? These questions are surprisingly hard! This introductory survey can
only brieﬂy touch on each one....

This book examines how professionals practising in various health and welfare
settings go about the ordinary, but complicated, business of making sense
of the symptoms and troubles with which their patients or clients present.
Our motivations for writing the book are varied, but are the result of our
conversations with each other about the problem of judgement in clinical
practice, which have taken place over many years of professional, academic
and research collaboration.

We propose an unsupervised, iterative method for detecting downward-entailing operators (DEOs), which are important for deducing entailment relations between sentences. Like the distillation algorithm of Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al. (2009), the initialization of our method depends on the correlation between DEOs and negative polarity items (NPIs). However, our method trusts the initialization more and aggressively separates likely DEOs from spurious distractors and other words, unlike distillation, which we show to be equivalent to one iteration of EM prior re-estimation.